Full Description
Property relations are such a common feature of social life that the complexity of the web of laws, practices, and ideas that allow a property regime to function smoothly are often forgotten. But we are quickly reminded of this complexity when conflict over property erupts. When social actors confront a property regime - for example by squatting - they enact what can be called 'contested property claims'. As this book demonstrates, these confrontations raise crucial issues of social justice and show the ways in which property conflicts often reflect wider social conflicts. Through a series of case studies from across the globe, this multidisciplinary anthology brings together works from anthropologists, legal scholars, and geographers, who show how exploring contested property claims offers a privileged window onto how property regimes function, as well as an illustration of the many ways that the institution of property shapes power relationships today.
Contents
List of contributors
Preface
Foreword: how property matters
NICHOLAS BLOMLEY
Introduction: disagreement as a window onto property
PATRICK J. L. COCKBURN, MAJA HOJER BRUUN, BJARKE SKÆRLUND RISAGER, AND MIKKEL THORUP
PART 1
Squatting and eviction
1 The right to the city and its limits: contested property claims, urban exceptionality, and the fight for relational space in Glasgow's Commonwealth Games 2014
NEIL GRAY AND LIBBY PORTER
2 Possession through dispossession: in quest of property and social mobility in urban Brazil
MARIE KOLLING
3 The politics of legal technicalities: an inquiry into the demolition of a Roma EU-migrant settlement in Malmö, Sweden
MARIA PERSDOTTER
4 Urban emptiness, ghost owners and squatters' challenges to private property
MIGUEL A. MARTÍNEZ
Intermezzos
5 Landed (Freeman's Wood): an exploration of landownership through contemporary art
JOHN ANGUS AND STOREY G2
6 In the time of Trump: housing, whiteness, and abolition
MANISSA M. MAHARAWAL AND ERIN MCELROY
PART 2
Land rights and conflicting laws
7 The work of ownership: shaping contestation in Ontario's aggregate extraction disputes
ESTAIR VAN WAGNER
8 Climate adaptation on the Australian east coast
TAYANAH O'DONNELL
9 Property as a technique of jurisdiction: traplines and tenure
SHIRI PASTERNAK
10 Decolonizing neoliberalism? First Nations reserves, private property rights, and the legislation of Indigenous dispossession in Canada
MICHAEL FABRIS (KREBS)
11 Contesting claims to gardens and land: gendered practice in post-war northern Uganda
JULAINA A. OBIKA, BEN ADOL OTTO, SULAYMAN MPISI BABIIHA, AND MICHAEL WHYTE
Afterword: prophecies on property's probability: climate change and smart contracts in the Anthropocene
BILL MAURER
Index
